izigame.me

Is it fair to give this game a negative review? I don't really think it is, but it comes more from expectations than objective quality. Strange Horticulture is not a bad game, I'd even go so far as to say it's a good one, but any time I see a game with Overwhelmingly Positive my standards are a bit higher. Minor spoilers ahead.
The game's core gameplay loop is good - you start with a number of plants and a book that gives you hints to varying degrees of vagueness. You alternate between between giving customers plants (which requires identifying them) and venturing out to find new plants/book pages. There's a considerable amount of plants and I like that the game forces you to be organized - a good system of tagging and cataloging the plants you have goes a long way, as does a decent memory and a eye for detail. Some of the vaguer descriptions can be solved by process of elimination and noticing small details about the shape of leaves, the thickness of the stem, or the direction of the flowers, and these are often some of the better moments. The best moments are when you actually have to use the plants for their uses to progress the story - can be some real nice a-ha moments there. Unfortunately, there aren't that many cases of this. There's also a handful of plants that I think are whiffs - either the book's description is up for interpretation and you need to hope yours matches up with devs', or the details just aren't a good match for the visuals, and it can be frustrating.
There's also some puzzles when it comes to finding spots on the map for new plants/pages - the majority of extremely simple, with a couple of headscratchers and a couple of ones that, again, feel too vague. What defines the "Edge of the woods?" is it the last square of the map that has trees, or the square beyond that? Feels cheesy when you're forced to guess, and need to wait for your exploration timer to tick back up just to try again in the same area. Again, some good moments here, but not enough to really blow me away.
My biggest issue with the game is the story - I just didn't care about it. At all. The majority of your customers are randomly-generated(?) townspeople with a couple of recurring, plot-centric characters, but all of those characters just feel flat. The store description says "Speak to a coven, or join a cult." This isn't dishonest per se, but when the coven comes to you and drops some dialogue to progress the story and you can't progress until you give them Plant A, it takes out all the mystique. Yes, you do travel to the woods they're in a handful of times, where you get like 3 sentences of prose, you use Plant B, get 2 more sentences and two more book pages. It's not exciting. Later on, you have to use the plant that makes you invisible to sneak past them, something I'd normally think is really cool. But when it says "The coven clearly isn't letting you past. Use Plant C for invisibility", what's the point? The magic plants and the world are cool written large, but my methods of interacting with them are so forced and shoehorned that I'm not able to really experience it. There are even times where a character comes in asking for a plant you don't have yet, and rather than sending them away, they just sit there watching you go over the clues you haven't turned into more plants/pages until you decide to climb a mountain of the other side of the country to find their plant.
Continuing on with the story, I just can't care about the events going on when I don't care about the characters or the world. It's awesome that some poor bloke got disembowled in a ritual sacrifice to summon The Creature, but my only methods of interacting with that is by giving Plant D to the investigator so that he's not scared by all the blood. The game is categorically very similar to VA-11 HALL-A, one of my favorite games - you stay in a single location, relatively isolated from the plot, as plot-relevant characters come to you and the things you give them might influence the story. But Valhalla works because the writing's impeccable and has a ton of heart. When characters in Valhalla come to your bar, I'm excited to see them because I care about their story, and the any juicy plot tidbits they drop are bonus. In Strange Horticulture, the plot tidbits are all the characters have to offer (although Verona's easily the best of the bunch).
There are multiple endings, but it usually boils down to "Use Plant E instead of Plant F on Day 7", and again, none of them are interesting when I'm not invested in the world. And yes, your cat Hellebore is cute and has some great purrs, but at this point adding an option to pet le heckin caterino is the equivalent of farming Reddit karma.
I enjoyed my time with Strange Horticulture, but considering the price and length (and lack of real replayability in my eyes) I can't enthusiastically recommend it, nor do I think its worth the Overwhelmingly Positive rating it currently has.